There is the statue, on a surprisingly small greensward along a redeveloped area on the widened section of Connecticut Avenue. Much, much taller than we remember him in life, he stands frozen in bronze with that familiar smirk on his face, his little eyes piercing but vague and unfocused, his body leaning forward, steadying itself on a bronze podium.
Because of all the trouble -- because of the investigations and revelations and the disgrace so profound it stunned even his political enemies -- the new president and Congress have agreed the statue must be removed. Toppled. Significant changes have taken place. They were long overdue.
[I] understand George W. Bush's war on terror not as an act of criminal stupidity but as the work of a man imprisoned in a past tense. I see the president making speeches against a backdrop of flags at the Naval Academy or among high-ranking uniforms at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and I think of a ten-year-old boy reciting the poetry of Rudyard Kipling,or of the youngest deck officer aboard the U.S. Navy flagship in a 1940's Hollywood movie made with the technical assistance of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. When I listen to the debates in Congress about what to do with our army in Iraq, I'm left with a similar impression -- of flies preserved in amber, or of Pleistocene vertebrates trapped for 30,000 years in the La Brea Tar Pits on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. Whether for against the war (urging immediate withdrawal or proposing unconditional reinforcement), the tribunes of the people don't seem to have grasped the fact that war as the heavy-weight instrument of foreign policy didn't survive, either as a technology or as an idea, its tour of duty in the graves of the twentieth century. ...Lewis Lapham, "Notebook," September '07
